Eco-friendly office space: Modern Ways to Make Your Office Greener

Contemporary office culture has come a long way since people first started talking about green solutions. Here are a few things to consider when you’re taking steps toward creating more sustainable office practices.

Don’t Forget Your Tech

In today’s office world, suggestions like “recycle your paper” are swiftly becoming much less relevant than energy saving tips involving technology. Although, of course, it’s still important to recycle waste paper, or choose recycled paper in the first place, in increasingly paperless offices it pays to consider the energy use of your electronics. If every person in your office is using a computer, imagine the impact of a company-wide policy governing their energy usage.

Program all computers to enter sleep mode after ten minutes of inactivity, and shut down your computer completely at the end of each day rather than allowing it to enter sleep mode. And if you’re still using screen savers, skip it—screen savers are a vestige of the early days of computers, when the image of your desktop would eventually be burned into your screen if left on too long. A static image—or better yet, black—requires much less energy to run than a moving screen saver. Or better yet, if you’re walking away for a few minutes, just turn your monitor off completely. It won’t affect your computer’s memory, performance, or state in any way, but saves energy just like turning off a light switch.

Choose Energy-Saving Appliances

There are many upgrades you can make in your appliances that will go a long way toward saving power, many of which are already becoming the new standard. Just as energy efficient light bulbs are the new norm, LCD monitors have been swiftly replacing the CRT monitors of the past, and if you haven’t made the change yet you should as soon as possible—not only are they three times as efficient, but the upgrade is inevitable. It’s also worth it in both the long and short run to invest in efficient hardware—when buying your computer processors and accessories, look at Energy Star 4.0 ratings or high EPEAT marks.

There are many things offices don’t even think about that can be made more efficient with upgrades—for example, using virtualization technology to consolidate your servers, reducing your need for multiple physical servers (which are huge energy suckers).

Consider Green or Alternative Buildings

The amount of resources used for brick-and-mortar buildings and traditional methods of construction are often overlooked. The Construction Materials Recycling Association estimates that the construction and demolition industries account for 250 million tons of waste each year (which doesn’t include roads or bridges), and these C&D materials make up approximately 35 percent of all waste generated annually. Luckily, there are greener modes of construction for office space. LEED-certified buildings are increasingly becoming a popular trend in CRE. Through LEED, developers and owners are provided with measurable solutions for creating more sustainable buildings. There are also alternative options, especially if you’re feeling a bit more creative, such as such as PVC fabric buildings, which require a fraction of the construction materials or transport, allow greater amounts of natural light to enter, and are made of entirely recyclable materials.

Incorporate Telecommuting

Telecommuting is more feasible in the workplace now than ever before. With dozens of ways of instantly communicating through video, audio, and computer screen shares, the necessity of in-person meetings has been largely reduced. If your employees or partners can work from home, they save a bundle in terms of the energy that would otherwise be spent on commuting. If you have meetings with clients or partners that would usually require someone driving for miles, consider having digital meetings whenever possible. You might want to allow employees to work from home a day or two out of the week. You’ll save money on your office resources while also saving some gas. 44 million Americans currently telecommute full-time, and that number is growing daily because it offers so many practical and environmental advantages.

In this constantly evolving modern workplace, the ways we think about going green need to keep evolving as well. What are some other things you implement to make your office greener? Let us know in the comments below!

Brokers, We Want to Hear From You!

We’re interested in hearing from you, brokers! As we continue to grow, it’s important to us that any changes that we implement – however big or small – are always for the betterment of our users’ experience. That said, your feedback is critical every step of the way.

We invite you to participate in this short survey; it will take no more than 5 minutes of your time, we promise! Tell us how we’re doing, where we can improve, and most importantly, what we can provide to help you:

Take the Survey

So don’t be shy, we want to hear from you! You can also reach us at (800) 560-3544 or feedback@officespace.com.

Calling All Tenant Reps!

So many inquiries, so little time

We’ve had a great 2012 and 2013 looks to be off to a fast start.  So much so that we are looking to expand our pool of Tenant Rep Brokers!

OfficeSpace.com has been extremely busy with our Portland, Denver, and San Diego launches and here is a brief summary of 2012:

  • Launched Portland, OR (Jan 2012), Denver, CO (June 2012), San Diego, CA (Dec 2012) AND
  • 243,000 visitors
  • 2,200,000 building views
  • 1,900 leads directly to listing brokers
  • Approx. 10,000 calls to listing brokers

We’re very proud of these results, however, we’re just getting started.

Destination for Tenants

OfficeSpace.com is where many tenants who are just starting to look for space first enter the market. We’re talking to these potential tenants, sometimes they simply request some marketing and listing contact information. Other times, these are tenants who are ready and willing to work with a Broker and this is when we send them to you. We are filling a void for tenants and they are finding us online.

Little Secret

As some of you may know, the OfficeSpace.com platform is open to nationwide listings even though we are focused on our home markets of Seattle, Portland, Denver, & San Diego.  In fact, we continually add new listings outside of our home markets and they are getting indexed.  In the last 30 days, much to our surprise, our non-home market web stats and lead activity has in some cases, surpassed our home market metrics:

  • 52% of visitor traffic was outside our home markets
  • 60% of our building views were attributable to our non-home markets
  • 30% of our leads & inquiries were generated from outside our home markets

The Opportunity

This is where you come in!

If you are an experienced Tenant Rep and would like to be part of our Tenant Rep Broker Pool, please email me at howard@officespace.com with a brief bio and I’ll be sure to contact you.  Oh, by the way, our Tenant Rep Broker Pool is free to join but spots are limited, so secure your first mover advantage and get in early!

If you have listings, get them onto OfficeSpace.com, you will get indexed, you will get exposure, and you will generate leads.

With your help, we’re making finding and leasing space a smoother and easier process!